


Streets Fell Into My Window

by frabjousday (frabjous)



Category: American McGee's Alice
Genre: Adventure, Gen, Horror, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frabjous/pseuds/frabjousday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Haven’t you been kept for long enough, Alice?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Streets Fell Into My Window

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShadedTopaz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadedTopaz/gifts).



> Spoilers for _Alice: Madness Returns_.
> 
> Warning: Like in the canon, there are implications of child abuse and sexual assault. There is also some Victorian-era attitudes about mental illness and an asylum features heavily. Please be warned if you're triggered by these kinds of things.
> 
> Title comes from [The Red Paintings - Streets Fell Into My Window](http://vimeo.com/32139589).

We arrive at Rutledge just in time for tea, or so the Cat tells me, but he’s no Rabbit when it comes to time-keeping. It’s scarcely noon.

“Time keeps those who try to keep time,” he says primly, and I think I’ve wounded his pride, the fickle thing. “Haven’t you been kept for long enough, Alice?”

The madhouse looms before us: its glistening white walls, and rivulets of red running from the doors and the windows like lava. As though the house itself were crying bloody tears. As we pause under a headless statue of Hatter, I side-step a crimson canal that oozes under the wrought iron gates. The Jabberwock is slain, but here was proof that those wretched Tweedles remained inside, controlling Hatter’s old domain.

“That’s a question for you to answer, Cat,” I say crossly. “We’re here at your bidding; I had no desire to return at all. Why have we come?”

He swishes his tail. “To seek your old friend Rabbit, of course.”

I give him a sharp look. 

“Have you known where Rabbit is all this time, then?” 

“Purrhaps,” he answers, and rubs his inked skin and bones around my ankles in contrition. I can feel the ribs of his skeletal body through my stockings. It is a wholly unpleasant sensation. “But your hand and blade was required for a more immediate danger. Rabbit is imprisoned, but all of Wonderland would have fallen had you not stopped that Infernal Train from reaching its destination.”

I suppose the Cat was right, but I wasn’t able to completely forgive my friend for withholding Rabbit’s location from me. 

I look back at Rutledge, the rivers of red pouring from every opening and staining the white tiles with black blood. I shuddered to think what had become of Rabbit at the hands of my tormentors.

My knuckles whiten around the hilt of my vorpal blade, and I take two steps towards the gated entrance.

“Patience, Alice,” the Cat warns. “A new master presides over this place, and he will raise a hellish scene if you are spotted. Best to play mad when you go amongst the mad.”

“I suppose going amongst mad people can’t be helped in a madhouse.”

“On the contrary, Alice; we’re all mad hereabouts. Those in Rutledge simply have the wisdom to recognise their own madness.”

And with that parting remark, his body begins to dissolve like the edges of burnt parchment. His grin hangs momentarily in the air before it too is gone.

Blasted Cat. Though it’s only to be expected. I welcomed any ally in a hostile Wonderland, but he was foremost concerned about saving his own skin.

I take the way around the back where a large oak tree grows along the boundary, and its roots and branches have broken through the regular spokes of the fence. Beyond the iron bars there are mad children about playing in the yard - the placid ones that have been considered too simple to escape. I feel nothing but pity; I was once like them. Perhaps they do not even see their prison bars. 

I tuck the vorpal blade into my apron, and clamber onto the first branch. The tree is ancient, towering above me like a castle. Jacks and marbles lodged into the branches aid my climb and provide ledges and crannies for a hand or foot.

Near the top of the tree, I can squeeze through the space left by a broken iron spoke. Was I really returning to this godawful place? White tiles and blood; grimy brick turrets and arched windows. Long ago, Rutledge had been a convent but those nuns are dust in the ground, their bones are food for worms.

Papa showed me a magic trick once: A circular disc with a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. He held the disc between two taut lengths of string, and when he spun the string it was as though the bird was inside the cage.

I’d gasped. He stopped its motion and showed me the disc again. It had been nothing more than a trick of the eye. 

The cage. 

The bird. 

The bird in the cage.

A girl. A knife. A blue dress.

I drop from the tree, landing on my feet. I grin, hearing the Cat’s purr of encouragement in my ear. 

I take my vorpal blade in hand, and its sharp edge winks in the sun.

*

The mad children say that they have seen Rabbit, but they are refusing to show me the way. They fear a creature inside the madhouse.

“The Warden has him!” they shriek. “And the Warden will have you!”

“His eyes! Red! Monstrous!” cries another.

“Never, never, never the Warden,” agonises a child, cradling his head.

“Calm yourselves!” I say sternly. Their wailing is bound to attract attention. “Warden or no Warden, I must find Rabbit. Now who will help me?” 

They cower and shrink away at the sound of my voice. Useless. Rutledge is a labyrinth with Science as its Minotaur, and my Sanity had its limits. I had no desire to spend years battling the monsters inside that place.

But then I feel a tug at the back of my skirt and look down. A sombre, dark-haired girl with wide eyes pulls at my petticoat. A metal contraption has been fitted to her head and wires are fused into her jaw and mouth, and her speech is much affected when she speaks.

“There are some who may know the way to your Rabbit,” she says meekly. “I can show you, if you like.”

The other mad children have already begun to skulk away, to return to playing in the barren yard. They play using rocks and rubber pipes and broken medical devices as their toys. One of them cradles and caresses a long metal instrument against their cheek as if it were a doll.

I look back to the mad girl. Her tunic and face are smeared with dirt and neglect, and when she tries to smile around the metal in her mouth, some spit leaks out of the side of her lip. 

“Do you know where my Rabbit is?”

She shakes her head. It looks like a painful motion with the metal around her head, but she gives no indication of pain. “No, but they will. The mad ones.”

“Not a particularly illuminating description given our location, if you don’t mind my saying so. What distinguishes their madness from the others?”

“They’ve been here the longest,” she says. She takes a few steps toward the main wing. “Coming?”

It would seem I had very little choice in the matter.

She leads me to a loose window facing the yard. As soon as it’s pushed open, the cracks between the white tile begin to leak their bloody tears. My hands and arms become covered in the syrupy substance as I climb through the window. It seeps into my clothing and my skin, almost dragging me down with its weight. 

I am reminded of those moments in hysteria where the world becomes black and white and blood red, and my body feels like a stranger’s. The effect, however, is almost the opposite. The syrup makes me slow, slug-like. 

“Alice?”

“Keep going,” I urge. We enter an white tiled room with white beds, each with four crimson buckles on the corner posts. A Lory lies on one of the beds, insensate and oblivious to our presence, its legs shackled and its wings pinned to the pillows. 

“Through here,” says my guide, pointing to the door. “But...”

I crouch at the door, ignoring the puddles of red I leave behind, and the way they try to suck me under the floor, like mud or quicksand. I turn the knob carefully, opening the door a crack, and peep into the corridor.

Large, slow-moving figures lumber beyond the door. Their tiny heads have no faces, and their bodies are dominated by their thick necks, broad shoulders and brutish arms. Like hairless gorillas.

Bandersnatch. Harmless, but only if undisturbed. And anything might set them off. So in fact, not quite so harmless.

All of a sudden, a bell rings throughout the halls, and the Bandersnatch pause, their blind heads perking to attention at the sound. They sniff the air, and as one, they begin their shamble towards the East wing of Rutledge. 

The mad child shudders next to me. 

“Where to next?”

“Upstairs,” she says, and I spy a stairwell a short distance away. After the last of the Bandersnatch disappear around the corner, I circle her wrist and we dash up the stairs, keeping to the shadows whenever possible. But the white tiles of the madhouse are like mirrors reflecting the light, and our footsteps echo loudly in my ears.

Luck, it would seem, is on our side this time. We encounter no Bandersnatch, and the first floor seems empty of life.

It is identical to the floor we’ve just left, but the corridor we face is more red than white. The ceiling pumps out the same sticky tar which crawls down the walls and covers the floors in a slippery mess. It makes a wet sucking sound as we lift our feet, and our ankles are thick with it. With every step, we sink a little deeper into the red muck. We barely move five steps when our entire feet have been covered. The the room is quickly filling up with these bloody tears. It seeps cold into my boots and despair into my heart.

“How much farther? At this rate we’ll drown before we reach our destination.”

“The other end,” she says, and the corridor morphs and stretches impossibly long in front of us. She’s pointing at a door at the very end. Of course. And the red has already reached my thighs in those few short moments. Soon it will reach the mad child’s shoulders and neck, and swallow my guide.

A trestle bed leaning against the wall catches my eye. It bobs a little in the liquid - a boat. But it is a very far distance to wade with the child.

“I can carry you,” I say, and she shakes her head. 

“You go without me, miss.”

“I’ll return for you.”

“It will be too late then.”

She’s right. The red tar is at her jaw now, and it drips from the metal around her head with a vile oily sheen.

“You go now, miss, or you’ll be stuck like me.”

I take one last look at the girl. She is right.

My body explodes into a thousand blue butterflies, and we fly by flocking together. Some of us become caught in the rising red, but we are many, and we are strong together as we flutter through the air. We near our destination with every flap. We will maintain our formation. Forward, forward, forward...

I drop on the trestle bed, exhausted from our flight and transformation, and the bed totters a little at the new weight. Back down the corridor, I see the last of the mad girl’s matted black hair disappearing under the red, but what’s another drop of sadness to an ocean?

Red laps at the sides of the bed, and my little boat will soon be consumed too. Without further hesitation, I begin paddling to the heavy steel door at the very end of the room.

*

The water level is high enough that I can drink a little elixir and walk from my bed through the keyhole. 

There are exactly two beds in this room, although they’re nothing more than wooden boards with a grimy sheet. The cell is padded and windowless, and my own memories of time in these rooms rise like bile in my throat.

“Oh look! It’s Alice!”

“Alice! Do stay for tea!”

I cross my arms and walk closer to the two occupants of the cell. 

“Hare and Dormouse, I’m surprised to find you here. I thought you and Hatter had set aside your old feuds.”

There is very little left of my friends, and more recently, enemies. Well, there hadn’t been very much of them to begin with, not after Hatter began his experiments into steam and machine, but now even their machine parts had been stripped off their bodies so they must lay immobile in their beds. They scarcely had a full torso, two arms and two legs between them. 

The situation was unlikely to have improved their sanity.

“There’s been a change in management! Hatter’s no longer in charge around here!”

Dormy giggles. “Yes, although it’s not very different is it? One hardly notices the change.” He wiggles the bottom of his legless torso. “Help a friend out, Alice,” says Dormy, “and pass us some tea.”

I look around me. There is no tea in sight.

“Indeed!” Hare agrees. “We have missed you Alice. No one pours like you do.”

“Pour Alice!”

“One minute you’re trying to kill me, and the next moment you’re inviting me to tea. You ought to make up your minds.”

“Make up our minds? We’re quite out of our minds! We can’t make up our minds unless you’re the one doing the making.”

I sigh. “Nonsense creatures. I suppose you must be the mad ones the girl wanted me to meet. I’m seeking Rabbit, and he’s somewhere in this madhouse. Have you seen him?”

“Seen but not heard! Seen but not heard!”

I’d forgotten how tiresome it was speaking to Wonderland citizens. They like to talk as if they’re deliberately trying your patience. The Cat positively delighted in his riddles. It’s best if one asks direct questions, though it never guarantees a clear response. “Do you know where Rabbit is being held or not?”

“The Warden has him!” Hare hisses.

“Where? Where?” cries Dormouse, flailing his arms uselessly. “Not the Warden!”

“I’ve been hearing an awful lot about this Warden. Who is he? Where can I find him? I do not fear battle.”

Hare struggles to sit up using his one good arm.

“Stay away, Alice. The Warden is not a creature to be trifled with.”

“It is the Warden who trifled first. If the Warden has Rabbit then I must see the Warden.”

At the mentioned of the Warden’s name, Dormouse covers his eyes. “Oh no! Not the Warden!”

I lay a hand over my eyes. The conversation was circling back on itself more than a Caucus Race. Even the Cat’s riddles were more preferable.

I consider my next words carefully, but the thought is interrupted by a metallic slide of a lock, and the door of the cell opening.

“The Warden!” screams Dormy. “The Warden is here!”

But it is not the Warden who enters the room. 

“Hullo Alice. Fancy seeing you here,” says Dum nastily. “Did you come back for some more fun at Rutledge?”

Their two rotund bodies fill the open doorway, blocking my exit. They waddle inside, snigger and elbow each other. Dum deliberately shuts the door behind him.

“P’raps she’s mad again,” says Dee, the larger of the two brothers.

“She’s never been sane. She should never have been discharged in the first place.”

“We’ll make sure you have a longer stay this time,” Dee grins, showing his rotten, crooked teeth. 

“No doubt about that! Read the paper? Humpty Dumpty is on her trail. Wanted for questioning! The last person to have seen Dr Angus Bumby alive. Suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.”

“Men like that will only find justice on the train tracks, or in a dram of poison,” I spit.

“Did you hear that Dum? She’s practically admitted it!” 

I stand taller. I am proud, not shameful of my work. 

Dum beady eyes focus on me. “Bumby’s our friend.”

“Yes, he is, Dee. Alice hurt our friend.”

“Naughty girl.”

“Very naughty.” Dum smiles then, showing rows of shark-like pointed teeth. “You know what we do with naughty girls at Rutledge.”

“Electric shock! It makes the patients jump. Or...”

“...other ways to make girls like you jump.”

They exchange a look and a slow, menacing grin crosses their faces.

I tire of their chatter already. I have defeated them before, and this time I catch them unawares. An alarm cannot be raised. I dispatch them quickly with two long slices of the vorpal blade. 

Their bodies slump to the floor, black blood pooling from the slits across their neck. Dee’s mouth opens and closes like a fish, and he makes a burbling noise. They are already more bearable than they have ever been, ever since their unfortunate mother gave birth to these idiots. They will be mere sacks of flesh in a minute, and the more charming for it.

Snicker-snack, the blade whispers.

*

Hare and Dormouse do not require further persuasion after that. 

I am directed to an area of the wall where the soft stuffing has burst leaving a flap of material and a small keyhole set into the wall. This, I am told, is a shortcut to the Warden’s lair.

I take a generous mouthful of elixir and hiccup. Everything seems monstrously large, and lilac chalk scrawls suddenly appear around the keyhole. It’s unclear whether the crude drawing is meant to represent a flames, or wings, or some sort of thorny bush.

I turn back to my sometimes friends and sometimes enemies to bid farewell, but it appears they’ve already forgotten the short visit despite the two bodies next to their beds. They are discussing the merits of mud-pies over magpies. Mad, indeed.

The path twists and forks, and I feel as if I have walked from the East to West end of London when I finally emerge in a room of jars. Specimens, they’re called. Each wall is filled to the ceiling with wooden shelves, and upon those shelves stand jars of all sizes.

Here is a bat. Here is a rat. And here is a cat. And here, in a large container... is a baby child. They float, suspended in their yellow watery coffins, their bodies placed on gruesome display like sideshow amusements. I do not fear the Warden - the vorpal blade will surely cut through his body like fresh butter and his blood will be jam for my scones. But I am half afraid that this is how I will find Rabbit: pickled and placed on display in Warden’s museum of horrors.

I pass a frog, bisected, with its organs sliced into perfect cross-sections. Its heart still beats. A fish of some kind, skeletal like the Cat. A mock-turtle, but not my dear friend, or the Warden would have much more to pay. A doll.

The doll’s eyes are wide and unblinking, and her head has been put on the wrong way so I stare at her face, her back and bare buttocks. 

Foreboding as cold as ice courses through my veins.

But then I see him, and I forget the doll. Placed on the shelf with the other specimens, but perfectly intact, sits Rabbit. As soon as I touch him, he leaps from the shelf onto the checker tile floor. He flicks open a tarnished silver pocket watch from his waistcoat.

“What has kept you, Alice? Late, as always,” he scolds.

“You’ve no sense of gratitude at all.”

“And you’ve no sense of time.”

A door slams open and the jars tinkle against each other. I spin quickly - the outline of a beast silhouetted in the door frame, it’s eyes of flame burning like coals. It opens its mouth and shrieks fire into the air and the sound shakes my bones.

The Warden is none other than the Jabberwock. A foe I had thought defeated.

He stamps towards me, his boiler and pistons hissing. 

“Alice,” he rumbles, low and unnatural. “Alice, what have you done? First you murder your family, and now you murder more innocents.”

As his body emerges in the light, I see that it is much changed. Black tar drips from his jaws; wire, nails and board barely hold what remains of his melted body. Closer, I see that he is blind, but his eye sockets leak that same red syrup, glowing lava. The Dollmaker’s influence has spread very far indeed.

I brandish my blade. 

“I will not fall for your tricks.” 

He laughs and the tar rolls down his chest in an oily slick.

“Oh Alice, but fall you will.”

He opens his mouth again, and a snake-like tongue darts out, impossibly long. It slaps my neck and I feel a pinch.

The vorpal blade clangs to the floor.

For a moment, I see a vision of a man wielding a hypodermic syringe. I know him!

And then, 

Nothing.

* 

My bed is warm, fleshy, alive.

I blink away the last of my sleep. The ceiling is pulsating mass of muscle, vein and blood. I sit up, and the muscle around me loosen and drop. I have been sleeping in a cocoon of her tentacles.

“You’re awake then,” says the Red Queen. She sounds simultaneously like a child, and very, very old being. “And you’ve wasted no time in finding someone to replace the Dollmaker.”

I put a hand to my head. 

“My head hurts.”

The tentacles lift me up to her dais, and gently place me at her feet. The flesh squishes.

I struggle to stand. 

“What has happened? How did I get here?”

Her expression remains inscrutable. “The Jabberwock has returned, but he has changed. Thanks to you, I no longer have the power to control him.” She turns away. “I am not such a cruel monarch as the monsters you’ve invited into Wonderland. But I cannot do anything without my power, and you too are weakened. You cannot face him in your current state.”

It is true. My limbs feel slow, heavy.

“Then what must I do?”

“After you reclaimed Looking Glass Land I punished the Red King by putting him into a deep sleep. You must wake him from his slumber, so he dreams no more.”

“What is he dreaming about?”

“He dreams about you, of course. He dreams about all of Wonderland.”

“But Wonderland is my dream,” I say.

She sits back in her throne. “Well then, we shall soon see who is dreaming of whom.”

I have little choice but to follow her instructions, but I am wary. “Where is the Red King?”

She smiles unpleasantly. “There is a friend who can show you the way.” A tentacle rises from the pit, and deposits Rabbit next to me. He stands, brushes his waistcoat and glares at Lizzie.

Then he turns to me. “Tick-tock, Alice. We mustn’t dawdle.”

We turn to leave her domain, the crumbling ruins of Queens Land.

“Wait. You’ll be needing this.”

I see the glint of metal as athe object sails through the air. I reach up to catch it by the hilt and it lands in my palm with a musical note.

The weight of the vorpal blade is comforting, familiar.

Now I am ready.

*

“They should hang her and be done with it,” says Nurse Cratchet. “Girl like that is a danger to everyone around her.”

Alice Liddle lies in a sparse hospital bed with the mangled rabbit under one arm, and with her wrists and ankles bound down by leather straps. Her eyes are open but empty, and she makes no response when light is shone into her eyes. Dr. Kinbote has also pricked her arm with a needle several times, and she has not flinched. She is entirely at the mercy of the drug.

“Yes,” he answers tersely. “I have read her file. Very dangerous. The girl clearly still suffers from her delusions, and they have only intensified in her life outside Rutledge. Now she returns brandishing a knife, has killed our two most respected orderlies and has very likely caused the death of my colleague, friend, and one of the most eminent practitioners of psychiatry in London. She is very dangerous indeed.”

Nurse Cratchet stands to attention beside him, eager for his approval. 

“I knew that Dr. Wilson when he worked here, sir. If you ask me, he was always too soft on the girl, giving her pencils and paper to draw, always letting her hold that ugly rabbit, and conversing with her like she were sane - all the while she ranted and screamed about her ‘Wonderland’.”

“Mmm,” he agrees sadly. “It is a pity that the good doctor made such a serious error of judgment to release her from the Asylum. Had she still been in Rutledge, the deaths of three great men might have been prevented.”

She hangs her head. “I’m sorry, sir. I knew you and Dr Bumby were close.”

Dr. Kinbote stands and smooths his tie. “A marvellous man, and highly altruistic. I will miss him dearly. We all will.” His face adopts a faraway, thoughtful expression, as if in remembrance of fond memories.

“Sir?”

He coughs. “As you say, Nurse, this girl is very dangerous. You will ensure that ten drops of this tincture is administered to her every three hours. We must keep her sedated at all costs and you are to give this task the utmost priority.”

“Yes, sir. And the rabbit? Doesn’t seem right she should get her way.”

“Let her keep her toy for now - taking it away may destabilise her condition. In three days the law courts will declare her to be unfit for trial and criminally insane, and she will be moved to another facility. _They_ can decide what to do.”

Nurse Cratchet moves towards the door. “Like I said, she ought to be hanged, no question about it.”

Dr. Kinbote lifts the edge of her gown while the Nurse chatters, giving the impression of checking a minor detail. He caresses the warmth of her skin with his fingertips. 

“It’s a pity,” he murmurs. “A real pity.”

He closes the door behind him.

The moon shines through the windows. An emaciated black cat previously hidden in the shadows slinks out from the corner of the room. It jumps on the lone bed in one smooth motion, and settles on the girl’s stomach. With an air of impatience, it begins to groom itself.

It gives a yowl of outrage when the body stirs.

Alice opens her eyes.


End file.
